Hi Fernando,

Thanks once more for the informative reply.

Interestingly the BIOS lists the 2 SATA Controllers, the first of which identifies 6 ports and has a configurable RAID setting whilst the second, containing the remaining 4 ports does not.

Zitat

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If the Intel SATA ports 7-10 cannot be used in RAID mode, the Intel RAID ROM v13.1.0.2126 cannot and will never be used by your system.

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That confirmed my understanding and hence why I raised the question with you. Please forgive my ignorance here.....but so far as the second "non RAID" Controller is concerned I presume that in legacy mode (as in EFI) Intel RST can be operated in AHCI mode using the appropriate driver?

Zitat

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ASUS obviously has inserted the second Intel RAID ROM v13.1.0.2126 by mistake. If the Intel SATA ports 7-10 cannot be used in RAID mode, the Intel RAID ROM v13.1.0.2126 cannot and will never be used by your system.

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In order to operate in the manner I have suggested above and thus in turn for the OS to run the relevant "driver" would this not require an appropriate OROM to be loaded first in order to do so? If so, is that perhaps the purpose of the discrete versions of the installed OROMS rather than simply an oversight on Asus' part as I understand these "duplicated" OROMS are also present on other 10 port Asus X99 boards?? NB. Again I apologise if, through my poor overall understanding of RST in AHCI, none of the above makes any sense!!

Finally, with this in mind, may I return to my original question.......Is there any reason you are aware of why both controllers should not be updated to the later V14.8.2.2397 OROM, this being closer to the installed V14.8.12.1059 driver?

Thanks,
PC Pilot

Thanks for the clarification Fernando!!
As both Controllers hold the same device ID (DEV_2822) either will therefore operate in AHCI mode WITHOUT ANY Intel RAID OROM being loaded....now I get it!!

I guess there is no obvious reason for this duplication......if I ever find an answer to why they have both been incorporated in the BIOS I will post here for the benefit of other members. The only thought I have is that perhaps in the early stages of development it was assumed by the OEM that the second controller would independently support RAID and thus it was coded in, whereas the final Intel chipset architecture only provided RAID support for the Controller serving the first six ports. Logically then, as you suggested:

Zitat

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ASUS obviously has inserted the second Intel RAID ROM v13.1.0.2126 by mistake. If the Intel SATA ports 7-10 cannot be used in RAID mode, the Intel RAID ROM v13.1.0.2126 cannot and will never be used by your system.

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.....word for word from the motherboard manual:

Zitat

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Due to chipset behaviour, the SATA6G_78 and SATA6G_910 ports (Black) do not support Intel Rapid Storage Technology and RAID configuration.

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So I will update ONLY the IRST RAID for SATA OROM located in 20FEEBDE-E739-420E-AE31-77E2876508C0 (serving Ports 1 - 6) to V14.8.2.2397 and leave the one located in E095AFFE-D4CD-4289-9B48-28F64E3D781D as is and we're good to go.

Once I have successfully compiled and tested the updated BIOS I am happy to draft a step by step guide covering the steps I followed if you think it might help others dabbling with an Aptio5 update involving both the automated aspects of the UBU Tool but with a manual replacement of the three (of the four) legacy OROMS (IRST & both LAN's) using the UEFI Tool.

Regards,
PC Pilot

EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded blank lines removed (to save space)

Hi again Fernando,

Thank you for the follow up! The Device ID's I was referring to were in fact those reported against the OROM Modules as extracted in the MMTool v5 which (as you clarified) obviously assigns the "RAID" ID.....more on this shortly!

Zitat

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The Intel RAID ROM, which is within the BIOS, has nothing to do with the Intel sSATA AHCI Controller.

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I can also confirm for sake of clarity that, as I noted back in post #452, with RAID enabled

Zitat

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"Device Manager shows both an Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller (DEV_2822) AND Intel C600+/C220+ Chipset sSATA AHCI Controller (DEV_8D62)"

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Similarly, I can also confirm that in line with your reply, with Controller 1 set to AHCI mode Device Manager reports the two Storage Controllers as "Intel C600+/C220+ Chipset SATA AHCI Controller (DEV_8D02) & Intel C600+/C220+ Chipset sSATA AHCI Controller (DEV_8D62") .....apologies for any confusion caused by my poor wording!

Your reply also notes

Zitat

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2.The other on-board storage controller, which manages the SATA ports 7-10, is natively an Intel sSATA Controller, which belongs to the Intel RST "Enterprise Edition" (=RSTe) platform. Its DeviceID would beDEV_2827,

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and this reference of the Device ID being DEV_2827 leads rather neatly to some fresh information which is particularly relevant to my previous post (#483) and which I was about to post! ....

Zitat

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I guess there is no obvious reason for this duplication......if I ever find an answer to why they have both been incorporated in the BIOS I will post here for the benefit of other members

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Continuing my research I came across this >RE: How to Mod an ASUS Rampage V Extreme BIOS - Post #80<

Zitat

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It is a little strange on this board as you can turn on the raid module via the ez-tuning menu or by the option in storage configuration, the module is installed twice in the BIOS to account for this as we found out when I initially modded the BIOS

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..... (thanks to @GoNz0)

As the architecture of my X99-Deluxe is strikingly similar to the Rampage V Extreme I thought it prudent to compare and can confirm that my BIOS 3402 also contains these same two means of enabling the IRST RAID...... back in Post #460 I noted

Zitat

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Experimenting with switching off the RST option in UEFI BIOS removes the IRST boot option menu (Control + I)

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however whilst I was aware of the option being present in the EZ Tuning Menu I wrongly assumed that it either operated the same switch or else was related to the EFI module.

In summary, it would appear that I was also mislead by another source which had identified that the discrete GUID's in which each of the two OROMS reside each referred to the different controllers....@GoNz0's analysis above provides a more credible explanation which also (as you confirmed previously) would otherwise have reported the device ID of the non RAID Controller to be DEV_2827. Clearly @GoNz0's explanation both satisfies this requirement and the fact (as noted in the first paragraph of this post) that the OROMS I extracted BOTH are assigned the Device ID of DEV_2822 in MMTool V5.

In the light of this new information, would I be correct to presume that you would now advise updating both OROMS to the same V14.8.2.2397?

Thanks again
PC Pilot

I can appreciate your scepticism....

Having BOTH 'RAID' access options identified as using separate OROMS does seem a rather strange solution on Asus' part to say the least!

...So far as the 'benefit' to me, well I guess satisfaction in having mastered the process and to be happy that all aspects of the 'updateable modules' (OROM, EFI, LAN, IRST and CPU Microcode) have successfully uprated....clearly this will be of greater benefit as time passes and the board becomes 'forgotten' by Asus as improvements become available solely to their then current range.

As requested, I will keep you posted once I have compiled and tested...

Regards,

PC Pilot

Hello Fernando, I just found this forum when I was looking for IRST drivers for my Z97 based system. I have read through all of the sticky posts and I must say I am impressed by your thorough testing and comparisons. Well done. However, I noticed that in your thread where you compared different driver versions of IRST, you declared version 13.2.4.1000 to be the best for Z97 systems but on the "which are the best intel ahci drivers" thread you've written that 13.2.8.1002 is the best one for Z97. I am just a tad bit confused, which one of these should I install? Reliability and stable operation is the most important thing for me. Thanks ahead of time!

Alright, thanks for the clarification. Also, I have downloaded the drivers and unzipped them. There are 6 files in the folder, but I don't know how to install them... Could you give some instructions?

Thanks man, just did that. I have a samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SSD and samsung magician shows significant performance gains in WRITE speeds as well as READ/WRITE IOPS compared to the standard msahci driver. I installed the version you tested with Z97, because I wanted to be double sure about reliable operation. I've bookmarked the page and will update to the next version once you have conducted the test whenever you find the time to do so. Thankyou :)

I have just finished reading the post you linked, useful information indeed. However, I don't know where to find the Intel MEI driver-only version that you installed for your Z97 system. Can you provide a link for that? Appreciate your support.